I never imagined when I got up in the early hours of the morning on April 8th to get something off my chest that it would have such an impact. My idea was simple – 1oo Academics, 1000 teachers. I imagined it would take weeks to get to this point. It took 100 hours for 1400 people to sign. They keep on coming in- almost 4000 parents and teachers have signed.

Last week we made front page headline news in The Independent and the same evening , the Channel 4 news. I will continue to campaign to keep this issue in the minds of the media so that parents and children are able to hear what research says about the education system.

To those of you who have already signed I cannot thank you enough. We have stood, shoulder to shoulder, from public school to PRU, from nursery to night school to ask one simple thing. That a man who is so committed to facts makes sure that he uses them.

THE REAL ENEMY OF PROMISE….

Before the Easter break, almost 100 academics drawn from the spectrum of educational research and practice, published a letter in The Independent querying the wisdom of Michael Gove’s changes to the curriculum. The response from the Secretary of State for education was astonishing to say the least. He claimed that the academics belonged to a sinister ‘blob’ dedicated to ruining the lives of children. He claimed that they were Marxist. He called them, and anyone who might associate with them, ‘enemies of promise’. On Question Time, he glibly noted that he could find 100 ‘good’ academics who would agree with him. To date, he has not. The 100 academics, on the other hand, have found support in the teaching profession and beyond. Around 1000 of them have attached their names to this rebuttal. They are people working in and with education on a daily basis. Many of them are also parents. They are drawn from primary, secondary, FE and HE sectors; from state schools, private schools, grammar schools, international schools and academies. They are tired of the way that educational research is being misappropriated by the current secretary of state. They are tired of a ‘yadda yadda’ approach to this crucial job – if I hear something I disagree with, I’ll just shout over it. They are astonished that a man appointed to serve the education system behaves like a child who has not yet learned to listen and to respect boundaries.

Michael Gove has used, frequently, the words of cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham to support his notions that the curriculum should be based on the acquisition of facts. Gove’s interpretation of this idea is that the curriculum should consist of nothing but facts, but Willingham argues in much of his work, that critical thinking is essential in learning and that all knowledge learned should be supported by thinking. Futhermore, he warns that in the United States, a similar programme led to teachers ‘giving children lots and lots of facts at the expense of critical thinking.’ Far from attacking thinking skills, as Gove suggests, Willingham values them, when taught within context and points out that ‘we’d love to test critical thinking if we knew how to test critical thinking. But we really don’t. So what we tend to do is test factual knowledge.’ While it is clear that Willingham supports a focus on knowledge, he voices concerns about high stakes testing and the isolation of the teaching of knowledge into rote facts. Indeed, all of the academics and teachers listed at the end of this article would fully support an education system in which children acquire knowledge, but it is how this knowledge is acquired and tested which forms the bone of contention. The education of our young is too important to leave to opinion and ideology. It requires evidence and thought.

This was a position that Michael Gove adopted when he came to office. He appointed ‘experts’ to advise him. Some of those experts have signed this letter. Others have publicly voiced concerns about the way he has ignored their evidence. Let’s take the expert panel on the National Curriculum as an example. In the report that the panel submitted, there was an entire chapter, based on decades of research that oracy underpinned academic success. This can be quite hard to understand if one considers that few examinations take a verbal form, but our written thoughts stem from the speeches we form in our heads. In order to be lucid on the page, we need to be lucid in our minds and practising the articulation of ideas is key to this. It is one of the reasons that the private sector places so much emphasis on debate. It is why Oxbridge universities continue to fund the hugely expensive tutorial system. It is why many of our leading orators – and Michael Gove is one of them – hone their skills in a debating society such as The Oxford Union. It is why we interview people face to face for jobs. Think for a moment of a working life in adulthood in which presentations, participations in meetings or any other form of communication was not essential. Research shows that vocabulary in child hood is a key indicator of future academic success and that building vocabulary and articulacy is essential in bridging that gap between children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds. This chapter has been completely ignored in Gove’s proposals. In fact most of the advice offered by the panel has been ignored, leading to the resignation of all but one of the original expert panel.

Policy on literacy was based on the advice of an expert in the way children develop reading skills – Debra Myhill and the founder of a widely used system of teaching of synthetic phonics – Ruth Miskin. Both have voiced concerns in the past few weeks at the way the government has ignored their advice. They describe the tests as ‘flawed’ and warn that they will lead to ‘poor teaching’. Indeed the DfE’s own research paper into ‘what works’ in teaching children to read warns against teaching and testing grammar ‘out of context’. So, Mr. Gove, where are your good academics – the ones who agree with you? They cannot all be enemies of promise.

Mr. Gove’s oratory skills and his ability to tap into the deepest fears of parents mean that his policies often find support in voters whose access to information is viewed through the lens of a privately educated media. These fears are seated in a belief that standards are falling and that Britain is failing to compete internationally with other systems. But if one explores the data from the OECD – the organization who administers the international PISA tests, we find some interesting ideas which do not at all sit in accordance with Michael Gove’s policies. Firstly, the tests are not based on knowledge, but the application of knowledge in ‘novel situations’. The highest performing countries have students who are able to think critically and innovatively to apply the knowledge they have. The OECD data throws up some other interesting facts. For example when the factor of class is removed, British state schools outperform private schools. In the highest performing countries, teachers are more highly valued than any other profession – in Finland for example, rather than being viewed as ‘enemies of promise’, they set and mark their own tests, are all educated to Masters level and enroll on university courses which are more competitive than Medicine or Law. In fact, the key unifying characteristics of those successful countries is the autonomy of the teaching profession and the regard in which it is held. It is difficult to see how Michael Gove’s attacks on the profession, or his changes to the curriculum help us to compete on an international stage.

It is difficult, when one reads the research written by those that Michael Gove admires, including the Marxist, Gramsci, to find the evidence that supports the highly selective interpretations that Gove incorporates into his policies. He glibly makes statements, presented as facts, which have no basis in reality at all. His statement that ‘you cannot be creative unless you understand how sentences are constructed’ denies the existence of childhood and yet it is delivered as a fact. If challenging this anti-intellectual reasoning makes us bad academics, or raising our concerns makes us bad teachers in the eyes of the Secretary of State, then so be it.

Let us repeat that we do not oppose the acquisition of knowledge. Nor do we oppose the idea that all children should succeed. We instead question the removal of skills from that process. We question the wisdom of the decontextualized testing of knowledge and the notion that there should be high stakes testing in which children’s futures become fixed once and for all. Michael Gove’s proposals for examination changes are akin to altering the driving test to the theory only examination and removing the option to retake the test. Despite the fact that it took six attempts for him to pass his own driving test, in schools Gove proposes the removal of second chances and mistakes. It amounts to the removal of hope and that is the real enemy of promise in this debate.

Signatories

Teachers:-

(AST stands for Advanced Skills Teacher, an alternative career path for teachers who wish to remain teaching rather than pursuing management roles)

Debra Kidd – AST Teaching and Learning, Secondary State.

Louise Astbury – Head of English and MFL, Sixth Form College, Examiner.

Serena Dawson – MFL teacher, Secondary State.

Jackie Schneider – Teacher, Primary State.

Michael Tidd – Year Leader, Middle School State.

Tim Taylor – AST, Primary State.

Rosie Marcus, Director of Programmes, CAPE UK.

Mark Coates – AST English, Secondary State

Julie Wright – KS3 Humanities Co-ordinator, Secondary State.

Sally Dennis – Year 6 and 7 teacher – 3-18 Academy school.

Alison Anderton – Teacher, State Primary.

Pete Benson – Teacher of Theatre – International School

Rebecca Patterson – PGCE Tutor – Higher Education

Emma Owen – Head of English – Secondary State.

David Richards – Teacher – Primary.

Mike Devitt – Principal Moderator – English A Level. Former teacher in both State and Independent sector.

1,779 responses to “Calling All Teachers”

I agree, that petitioning alone is not enough, but without it, I would not have had the lever to be heard in the national media or to present my thoughts and ideas to parliament so it was a means to an end, not a means in itself, but I know what you mean. For me, the next step is always the next step. The letter was the letter – people are still signing and it featured in our local press today, but the main question is Now What? Which is why I’m continuing to write, blog, set up conferences and campaign. And teach, of course. Though highlights help with the white hair!

I work as an NHS GP in North Somerset. SOme children known to me who seemed to love learning are now fearful of attending school because of the constant tests and the demand that they read 5 times weekly . I fear that such children will not only be put off leaning for ever but will also develop significant mental health problems.